Amy Greene - Long Man

“Just a minute,” Amos said. “I want to ask him something.” He pressed the knife tip into the power company man’s flesh, drawing a line of blood in its pale smoothness. Beulah remembered one of the man’s coworkers walking away from Bud and Fay Willet in a pin-striped suit, leaving them weeping on their porch. As young as he looked, she had no sympathy for him.

“Let him go,” Ellard said.

“What are you here for?” Amos asked.

The power company man stared straight ahead unable to answer, walleyed with fear.

“You’re here to run people off their land,” Amos answered for him.

“No—” the man protested, cringing away from the knife.

“Don’t you work for the TVA?”

The man raised a feeble hand to pry at Amos’s forearm, a ring with a topaz stone glinting on one of his fingers. Beulah doubted he even knew what he was saying. “Yes, but—”

“What department?”

“Family Removal Section,” he gasped out.

“Removal Section. That’s a choice. Who else is running people off, if not you?”

“Not me,” he insisted, his face turning bluish. “They give the orders—”

“There is no ‘they,’” Amos said, pressing the point of the knife deeper into the man’s throat. “Like your head. It’s one part of your body, but you wouldn’t be much use without it.”

“That’s about enough,” Ellard shouted, pulling the hammer back on his gun.

The power company man’s eyes rolled around as if to seek help, his blood mixing pink with the sweat soaking his once clean white shirt collar. “What would happen,” Amos asked into the man’s ear, “if I cut off one of this dam builder’s parts? Would it make any difference?”

“No,” the man begged.

Ellard stared at Amos’s battered face over the barrel of the revolver. Amos looked back at him steadily. “I’ve been itching to kill you going on forty years,” Ellard said. “I’ll do it, Amos.”

“I know you pretty well after that long,” Amos said. “You’re all talk.”

“What about me?” James broke in, letting go of Annie Clyde. “You reckon I’m all talk?” He stepped forward, his auburn hair and ruddy skin bright in the dreary cinder-block basement. He was a head taller and twenty years younger than Ellard or the constable. Beulah didn’t see what either one of them could do if he rushed the jail cell bars and got his hands on Amos again.

Amos’s eye stayed on Ellard and the gun. “No,” he said. “But I think you’re beat.”

Splotches bloomed in James’s cheeks. “You just keep on thinking that way.”

Beulah felt panic overtaking her. Threatening the power company man wouldn’t stop James Dodson from finishing what he’d started in the Hankins woods. She doubted James would care much if Amos cut off the power company man’s fine blond head. But Amos was ignoring the danger. “I’ve been shot at before,” he told Ellard. “As long as I can remember, people have been trying to get rid of me. You won’t be the one to do it.” Then he shifted his shining eye back to Annie Clyde. “Go ahead and put the blame on me, if it makes you feel better.”

“Please, son,” Beulah pleaded. “Turn him loose.” There was a charged pause. She could hear the breathing of those around her. The power company man’s eyes darted about in search of rescue but nobody moved. Then without warning Amos let go, giving the man a shove. He took in a whoop of air and staggered out of Amos’s reach, falling then scuttling to his feet. Even in that moment Beulah knew Amos hadn’t released the man because she told him to do it. He did nothing unless it suited him. He let the power company man go for the same reason he would never have hurt Gracie Dodson. Amos was not a murderer, no matter what they thought of him.

As dark settled over the valley Silver Ledford plodded down the winding mountainside. She carried no light through the trees but over the years she had learned not to need one, feeling her way along the ridges. She was headed to Beulah Kesterson’s cabin after having spent an hour in the woods a mile above her shack. She’d meant to make sure no lawman or searcher had stumbled across the still, though it would have been nigh impossible. Plum had taught her that trails led the law to a man’s whiskey so she never took the same path twice in a row. She’d approached from downstream, the water rushing engorged. She knelt to inspect the concealing laurel she’d piled and it seemed undisturbed. There were no footprints in the clay of the bank save those of minks and raccoons. She moved the bushy limbs, drops spraying from the leaves, and found the still pot unmolested. After a while she got up again and looked into the foggy woods to the right of the stream. Over there she could see the outline of the shed leaning under a chinquapin tree, leaves and spiked burrs littering its tin roof. Like her grandfather before her, she stored sugar, sweet oil and mash barrels inside. But now the shed held more than that. She had wanted to move toward it but her feet were rooted for a long time. Her eyes wouldn’t blink. They filled with rain. For most of her life Silver had kept her own counsel. But as she stood there immobile, Beulah had come to her mind. She knew she had to see the old woman, if she couldn’t see Amos.

When it was still early morning Silver had gone into the canebrakes other searchers avoided, the briar thickets that tore scarlet lines in their arms. Disturbing nests of copperheads heaped over with leaves, probing with her fingers into the slick nooks of the riverbank on the other side of the dam and drawing them out catfish-bitten. She had scouted the Hankins pasture and the bracken across the fence, knowing Amos made his camp somewhere close. She’d tried to crawl into the laurel, twigs snagging her hair, but not even a child Gracie’s size could have forced her way in. Then at around eleven o’clock, coming down the bank in front of the Walker farm, she was stopped by Ellard Moody. While she was trapped in a car with him the old loss had threatened to surface. If she drew pictures, she could have sketched his boyhood face from memory. It was once that dear to her, freckled and serious with sad brown eyes. His body lean with muscle, his head full of cowlicks the color of maple sap. Decades had passed since her summer with Ellard but she could still feel his lips forming her name against her ear. Sometimes she would go to the river and remember lying there with him, the sun lighting his smooth brow above her, minnows swimming over and between their skins. When the wind mimicked the wail of a baby she looked around as if she might have had some other life with Ellard that she’d somehow forgotten. Theirs would have been a girl with eyes like flakes of moon. If she fretted, Silver would have held her. If she got cold, Silver would have stoked the fire. If food was scarce, Silver would have given her portion. If colored leaves were ankle deep, Silver would have swished through them with her.

Ellard had treated Silver like something precious. But when Amos came back to Yuneetah at the end of that summer, three years after he left for the first time on a northbound boxcar, Silver was drawn right back to him. She had tried not to think about Amos when she closed her eyes, but she tossed and turned all night in her bed. Knowing he was down the hollow at Beulah’s she burned herself lighting the fire at breakfast. At dinnertime she scorched the beans. She cared for Ellard but she didn’t belong with him. She had thought while she was caught up in his arms that she might always be with him, that she might even marry him. Then Amos came back tossing shale at her window and the pull she felt toward him was stronger than ever. She found herself choosing to go off with Amos when she had agreed to wait for Ellard down at the river with her fishing pole. Amos would come to her with a bucket for blackberry picking and she would follow him into the canes to sit on the trunk of a fallen chestnut, to gorge together until their bellies swelled. Silver spoke her mind more to Amos than to anybody. But that late September she didn’t tell him about the illness she’d begun to feel in the mornings.